The present invention relates to a video processing apparatus and method and, more particularly, to such apparatus and method for use with an electronic still camera for recording and/or reproducing still image digital video signals and audio data onto and/or from a recording medium such as an optical disk, a magneto-optical disk or a semiconductor memory.
In a digital recording type electronic still camera, an image of an object may be supplied through a photographing or charge coupled device (CCD) so as to obtain a video signal. Such video signal may be converted to digital form and compressed in accordance with an image compression technique of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG). The JPEG technique may compress still image data by using a discrete cosine transform (DCT) and length-variable coding. As a result, such JPEG technique may be able to compress colored still image data with a relatively high compression ratio, such as 1 to 1/100. The digital compressed video signal may thereafter be recorded on a recording medium.
The recording medium may be a magneto-optical disk which is contained in a housing or cartridge. Such magneto-optical disk may have an outer diameter of approximately 64 mm and a thickness of approximately 1.2 millimeters. Further, such magneto-optical disk may have a plurality of tracks for storing data with a track pitch of approximately 1.6 micrometers.
The above-described.magneto-optical disk/cartridge may be similar to a so-called mini-disk (MD) used to record audio data. Such disk may record approximately 140 Mbytes of data, which corresponds to approximately 365 still pictures in JPEG-compressed form and approximately 40 minutes of audio information in a so-called ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) form.
The above-described electronic still camera which records data in a digital form onto a magneto-optical disk has numerous advantages. For example, a relatively large number of still image data may be recorded on one disk, the quality of the recorded images may remain substantially high and may not substantially deteriorate over time, compilation of data is relatively easy, and still image data may be copied into a computer. Furthermore, such use is believed to increase in the future.
When taking photographs with an electronic still camera, an operator may wish to store audio data together with the still image data. Such audio data may include a narration pertaining to the circumstances of the respective photograph or photographs. Further, an operator may wish to record characters which provide information pertaining to the photograph(s). For example, such character(s) may describe the circumstances, places and/or dates of the photographs. Furthermore, an operator may wish to provide a framing or ornamental pattern(s) with the photographed image. Additionally, an operator may wish to increase or decrease the,size or scale of a still image(s) or deform such image(s).